France.L'Amarante · a biologist sees an object hover over his garden

On Thursday, October 21, 1982, at about 18:00, a married couple came to the gendarmerie station in a suburb on the outskirts of Nancy. The husband, a 30-year-old biologist who asked for anonymity and whom the official file cites under a pseudonym, stated that that same morning, at about 12:35, while in the garden in front of his house, he saw a bright object arrive from the southeast that he first took for an aircraft. The sky was clear and the Sun was not in his eyes.

The object came down slowly until it was above him; the witness stepped back three or four meters and saw it clearly: an ovoid shape a meter and a half across and eighty centimeters thick, with the lower half metallic-looking, like polished beryllium, and the upper half a lagoon blue-green color. It stayed suspended a meter above the ground for twenty minutes, silent and giving off no heat, cold or any other perceptible signal.

The witness came within fifty centimeters of it. He went upstairs for his camera, but when he tried to take a picture it jammed; he specified that it had failed before. After the twenty minutes, the object suddenly rose vertically, very fast, "as if by a strong suction", until it was lost from view. It left no marks on the ground, but the witness noticed that the grass stood up as it left and quickly returned to its position. That evening, back home, he found that a group of amaranths in the garden, a few centimeters from where the object had been, had withered, and linked it to what he had seen.

At 8:00 the next day the gendarmerie sent a telex summarizing the case, which records the object coming from the southeast, the vertical climb at about 12:56 and the jammed camera, and came back to take samples; GEPAN, the French space agency's aerospace phenomena study group, was informed on October 23 and, after speaking with the brigade, decided to investigate even though there was a single witness.

The investigators arrived on October 29 and ran into a problem: the witness had tidied the garden, and the amaranth bed had been pulled up two days earlier. GEPAN reconstructed the scene, measured the garden, analyzed the witness's account and took a second series of samples.

Its technical note no. 17, dated March 21, 1983, devotes a chapter to the lifting of the grass: an experimental study concluded that only an electric field of at least 30 kV/m (30,000 volts per meter), able to produce a corona effect (small electrical discharges into the air) at the tips of the blades, could lift fifteen-centimeter grass. If such a field existed as the object left, some sixteen centimeters from the flower bed, it would there have exceeded 200 kV/m and could have caused a strong current discharge through the vegetation. The note warns that this cannot be stated to be the cause of the withering, but that it is a clue to be considered.

The samples were sent to the Plant Physiology Center of Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. The biochemical analyses gave no conclusive results: the first samples had not been kept at a low enough temperature and the amaranths had already been pulled up. The two Toulouse researchers who ran the analyses, Abravanel and Just, noted that the nearby weather station had recorded a sub-zero temperature and light mist on the day before the sighting, October 20, which might have dried the leaves of the plants set against a railing.

GEPAN concluded that the observing conditions the witness describes were very good (in broad daylight, for minutes, at close range and from several angles), that if there was an error it must have been enormous and that the analysis of his account revealed no tendency to distort what was perceived; but, with a single witness, there was no way to confirm it.

A critical study of GEPAN's cases published by the Cercle zététique later proposed two explanations for the sighting: as its "first lead", a complex visual illusion, in particular a migraine aura, a neurological disorder that, it writes, "lasts precisely 20 minutes on average"; as the second, a hallucination, "a perception without an object". The same study puts the withering of the amaranths down to the season and to "an early frost".

GEPAN, the official French service, studied this sighting as a physical-trace case, with laboratory tools: a gendarmerie statement, plant samples, biochemical analyses, a reconstruction of the site and a physical model of the effects. Its technical note no. 17 explains in detail what it found and why it could not find more.

What is reported is the observation of a scientist, in broad daylight, for twenty minutes and at times only half a meter from the object, with nothing that could easily be mistaken for an aircraft, a balloon or a celestial body. But there is a single witness, the camera failed, the plants were pulled up before the investigators arrived and the samples were poorly preserved. Everything physical about the case (the withering, the lifted grass) ultimately depends on the testimony or on remains that could no longer be analyzed, and the frost on the day before the sighting offers a plausible natural explanation for the state of the plants. The electric-field calculation starts by accepting the account in order to deduce what would be needed to produce what it describes; it is not independent evidence.

The case remains open between a psychological or medical explanation of the sighting (a migraine aura or a hallucination, according to the Cercle zététique study) and the hypothesis of an unidentified phenomenon; the note itself writes that the analysis of the witness's discourse and behavior revealed nothing symptomatic of so deep a distortion of perception or memory, and adds in the same paragraph that, with a single witness, no analysis of consistency between testimonies is possible to confirm it. GEIPAN, the current name of GEPAN's successor service, keeps it in its D category, that of cases that remain unidentified after a consistent investigation. In its conclusions, the note says that, once again, the problems lay in the sampling and preservation techniques, and that even with properly taken samples the interpretation of the results remains delicate.